What Is Poem in Your Pocket Day?
What is Poem in your Pocket Day?
April is National Poetry Month in the United States. For those of us that enjoy reading poems, April is an exciting time. Poetry and poets in general are not among the most respected artists, as the “audience” for poetry continues to shrink. More people read novels, newspapers, magazines, and other media than poetry, and because of this the market for poetry is not just small, it is constantly shrinking.
But before I get up on the soap box, it is important to remember that poetry is still celebrated here in the US. Besides National Poetry Month, there is “Poem in your Pocket” day, a relatively new phenomenon that is celebrating its seventh year in 2009. PIYP day, as it is sometimes called, is April 30, the last day of National Poetry Month. In 2009 it happens to fall on Thursday — a day that many schools, libraries, and even entire towns will set aside to read, write, and enjoy poems.
What began as a celebration in New York city in 2002 has grown into a nationwide day to celebrate poems. People are urged to carry “poems in their pockets”, maybe replacing the usual iPod or loose change. The idea is that any time you have a break, or run into a friend or coworker, you can read your poem to them and they can share one with you. I’m celebrating this year by carrying one of my favorite poems — “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” by Randall Jarrell, with its famous concluding line: “When I died, they washed me out of the turret with a hose”. I’m not doing this just because it is dark and a little gory, rather because I love war poems, and poetry by soldiers. I find that soldiers under pressure of death create great work, and I intend to share this opinion with the people I meet, hoping they will look up Jarrell and other famous war poets.
The organizers of Poem In Your Pocket day encourage people to carry their own poem, if they so desire, to spread their own work around. There are even poets, like Bruce FOgerty of Dallas, who plan on carrying multiple copies of the same poem in their pockets in order to hand them out, or leave them in places where people will find them. This “viral” attitude to poetry is nothing new — for years, cities like NYC, Boston, Chicago, and others with large metro transit systems have put pieces of poems (or whole poems) on the walls of subways and bus stops to encourage people to enjoy poetry, or just to pass on a pleasant life affirming message. Poem in your Pocket day is just one day of the year that people are using to spread poetry and their love of verse.
The idea of carrying a “Poem in your Pocket” is that you will enjoy the poem on your own and spread the verse you love, or the verse you have written, among people. But there are other ways to celebration Poem in your Pocket day — many schools are hosting “open mic” events where their students can share poems they love or poems they’ve written in front of a captive audience. What began in New York has spread as far as south Texas, where in Corpus Christi plans are underway for a city wide celebration of poems, including hosting readings by major poets and amateurs alike. Check your local library or university to see how you can celebrate your love of poems with others.
Hopefully, we will not need “Poem in your Pocket day” in the future. The goal of this project, and of National Poetry Month, is to encourage the reading, discussion, and study of poetry. It seems these days that people need an excuse to read or appreciate poems — be it for a class or for a romantic moment. But the fact is that a poem can be a quick burst of inspiration, a lively piece of reading that can be absorbed and appreciated much faster than a full length novel, or even a short story.
This Thursday, celebrate “Poem in your Pocket day” with the rest of the country. Print out a poem you love, or scribble a poem of your own onto a post-it, and be prepared to share your poem with friends and family.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 30th, 2009 at 10:26 am and is filed under Books, Entertainement, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.